Paint it black

By Elda Silva :
March 8, 2012
: Updated: March 12, 2012 12:43pm

SA LIFE: Vikky Jones is presenting her MFA thesis exhibition as part of Contemporary Art Month. Her monochromatic paintings and drawings of objects such as wet fabric and a tea set floating in a water evoke dreams and the subconscious. Helen L. Montoya/San Antonio Express-News

Photo By HELEN L. MONTOYA/San Antonio Express-News

SA LIFE: Vikky Jones is presenting her MFA thesis exhibition as part of Contemporary Art Month. Her monochromatic paintings and drawings of objects such as wet fabric and a tea set floating in a water evoke dreams and the subconscious. Helen L. Montoya/San Antonio Express-News

Early in Vikky Jones' grad school career, a visiting artist stopped by her studio at UTSA.

At the time, Jones was working on a series of paintings dealing with consumerism and advertising.

Wasting no time, the visiting artist summed up Jones' work in a tidy two-sentence statement.

“I was like, ‘Wow! You understand,'” recalls the petite 31-year-old, wearing a paint-splattered apron over a black Dalí T-shirt, jeans and flip-flops. “But then she said, ‘I think you should start over.'”

It was a heartbreaking moment, but also a liberating one. Noting Jones' all-black wardrobe that day, the visiting artist made a suggestion.

“She was like, ‘Why don't you just start doing black work, like go all the way?'” Jones says. “I was like ‘All right.'”

“Make Me Dream,” Jones' MFA thesis exhibition, and one of Contemporary Art Month's officially “recommended” shows, is a series of black-on-black paintings and drawings of images that look as if they were dredged from the depths of the subconscious mind. In one piece, inky water pools in the folds of fabric obscuring what? The ambiguity creates a sense of unease. In another, an antique tea set is carried off by a flood.

“A lot of people — I would say 99 percent of the people who see it — say, ‘It reminds me of “Alice in Wonderland,”'” Jones says of the latter piece.

Maybe it's just the swirling tea cups or maybe it's because looking at Jones' work makes viewers feel as though they've fallen down the rabbit hole — a dark one. Evocative titles taken from snippets of conversations add to a feeling of disorientation.

For the show, Jones painted the gallery walls a warm gray after trying out several shades on her studio walls. Her paintings and drawings are “so dark, the white wall is really distracting,” Jones says. “So I decided to gray it. I actually did a trial in black, but it was so much black, (it) kind of took your breath away.”

“Make Me Dream” is sharing gallery space with “Filling the Void,” an exhibit of work by Alexander Comminos. His ceramic sculpture and abstract work provide a colorful counterpoint to Jones'. Located at the Blue Star Art Complex, the UTSA Satellite Space is the off-campus gallery of the university's department of art and art history.

“The space is thought of as an experimental space, showing work from professional artists, exhibitions curated by faculty or grad students and the host for MFA thesis exhibition,” says gallery coordinator Clay McClure.

The idea behind the MFA thesis is to “allow graduate students an opportunity to have a professionally exhibited show as their final exhibition,” he says.

Previously, Jones exhibited her work at various venues around San Antonio as part of A Beat Collective and at Una Noche de la Gloria, the West Side arts festival.

Born in Guam, Jones had a nomadic youth as part of a military family. Before moving to San Antonio, she attended high school in Japan. Here, she earned her bachelor's degree in painting at UTSA, then took a four-year break before returning to school for her master's degree.

In spite of the show's title, only one piece in the show was inspired by an actual dream of Jones'. “I Wasn't, No, I Wasn't” depicts a female figure sprawled on the stairs. Only her lower body is in the frame.

“I have a lot of dreams where I fall — I trip and fall,” she says. “But I'm obviously really fascinated with fabric, so I had this really satiny skirt (on the figure), so you can't see who it is, or what happened.”

Two of Jones' favorite subjects are fabric and water — both infinitely changeable. She works from pictures, photographing objects floating in a Plexiglass tank she made, or in the bathtub. She also frequently models for the images herself. For “Beneath My Notice,” she worked from a photograph of herself in a bathtub covered by a wet sheet. In the painting, water the color of molten lead pools in a small valley created by her legs under the clinging fabric.

“You get the reflection of the water, and it's just really eerie, because there's this figure that you can't quite tell what's going on,” she says.

It's those subtleties that Jones enjoys about making black-on-black work. Not to say that color doesn't sneak in here and there as in “C'mon Love. Would You Please?” an image of a submerged teapot and cups. Close inspection reveals muted red and yellow on the surface of the water, an echo of the coppery sheen produced by reflections on the water in the color photograph Jones worked from.

Jones creates her drawings on black paper. For paintings, she mixes browns and reds into black base that gives the paint a chocolaty tint when it's wet. That's a trick Jones learned early on “because the black by itself, I realized it kind of disappears when it dries,” she says. What looks like white on the canvas is really a dark gray. Stare long enough, and some of the color seems to seep out.

“This one, for example, has a lot of red in the fabric,” Jones says, referring to a painting titled “It's Not Going to Wait for You Anyway.” “You look at it for a while, it will start to look kind of purple.”

And toying with viewers' perceptions seems to be at least part of the artist's goal.

“I definitely want to elicit an experience from everybody who comes in,” she says. “I really wanted it to be a dark, dreamy atmosphere. So if they get that, that would be ideal for me.”

“Make Me Dream” is on view at the UTSA Satellite Space, 115 Blue Star, weekends through March 18. Call 210-212-7146.